Bullets of Rain (27 page)

    
Only one murderer, truly,
Art thought. What did that make him? An accessory before the fact?

    Back at the house, with Blitz calmed down anew, Luther held another mug of coffee to thaw his frozen fingers and ran details like someone who was used to this kind of hasslement.

    "Okay. We didn't have time to dig for slugs, so I'd suggest you make that gun disappear. You have others?"

    "Yes." Art had changed into doubled dry sweatshirts. Suzanne was still dead to the world. His eyes kept checking the emergency floods, which he swore he could see dimming already.

    "You got specific ammo for it, I'd ditch that, too. Unless you have spare barrels, and you can switch those out and keep the gun. No? Shame to lose it."

    Art was already running the tab in his head. A couple grand for the generator and attachments, two more for the pistol, plus damage to the Jaguar and the garage in general. Another bill Bryan would never pick up. Compared to attorney fees for a trial, this killing was still a bargain. He wondered what Derek's hotshot lawyer, that Cutler Jr. guy, would make of such an account.

    "So where are the so-called navy dudes? Aren't they supposed to be back by now? Maybe you got lucky and the storm ate them." Luther delicately tested the back of his skull again, hoping the news was better this time.

    Art shrugged. "Does your head hurt? You want something for-?"

    "Naw, better to be straight. Too many toxins at Price's. I needed the exercise, outside, and the adrenaline to flush my system. You know, if those guys in the Humvee are for real, we can't get rid of Bryan 's car. It'd look suspicious. Have to dump it eventually, though.''

    "What about the toxins at Price's?" Art tried to make it sound concerned and innocent, and fumbled the emotion.

    "Shit, you saw me at the party. I was out of control."

    "Seemed like you were a little too in control. So sharp it hurt. I figured speed; some kind of upper."

    Luther laughed. It was harsh, like a smoker's cough. "Fucking Price and his party favors, man. He slip you any of that shit?"

    Art was glad to be occupied in the kitchen, and not seeing Luther's eyes directly as he lied. "What shit?"

    "Those capsules. These capsules." He dig into his pants pocket and produced a prescription bottle with the label torn off. He spilled several of the home-dipped black-and-white capsules onto the glass of the coffee table for inspection.

    "Do you know what they are?"

    Luther pursed his lips dourly and shook his head. "I heard Michelle call them Mr. Hyde. They flip you. Flip you for real."

    "What, you mean they uninhibit you? Hell, all drugs do that- change your personality."

    "Naw, it's different. It's like they locate your opposite self and bring it right up to the surface. Or they find what you do your best to suppress and spotlight it. Maybe put you face-to-face with what you don't want people to see, ever. All I know is I took one, and I ain't never hit a woman before in my life, until I had that girl Katha rolled over-you should pardon my Frog. I just started slapping her, and it made me hard as a spear. Right after that was when you met me in the hallway."

    Art remembered Bryan weeping in Price's bathroom. Suzanne's one-eighty mood swings, just like Jekyll and Hyde. The way he'd savaged Bryan in the garage after ingesting the drug. He had not felt possessed or spacey, just angry, collecting his due. Perhaps that was the most sinister quality of Price's concoction-you didn't feel any different. As Luther said, you just… flipped. Almost instantly.

    "I figured there was some high-end coke in here, but I'm not a pharmacist," said Luther as he snapped open a Buck knife from yet another pocket. He unscrewed one of the capsules and dumped it onto the glass, using the knife tip to browse the granules.

    Art saw that the contents of this capsule were almost all black. The difference between this and the dosage he'd swallowed was like the contrast between a graphite sketch on white paper and scratchboard. Scratchboard was black; you made images on it with white lines. He could swallow one of these now, and become the guy who could rape Suzanne and leave her for dead, the guy who could shoot Bryan and think about frying his nipples with a blowtorch, the guy who could defeat all corners in the middle of this goddamned hurricane.

    "It looks like ground pepper," Art said, heart thudding.

    "Little more kick than that," Luther said with a grin. "It was a horror show, all right, with Price playing super-dad and feeding these to his flock and watching them flip. Didn't bother him no more than some wacko artist, picking colors for a painting-you know, one of them masterpieces that looks like throwup? But you know what? I never saw Price take one."

    "That's when you decided to leave?"

    "Well, the house coming apart had something to do with it, but yeah, the party was pretty much over for me."

    "Excuse me for saying so, Luther, and tell me I'm out of line, but what does a guy like you owe a guy like Price, that he'd do that to you?"

    "Wasn't like that. Price was my friend. Got me a high-end lawyer once when I needed it. Regular customer for, you know-'' Luther mimicked a pistol with his thumb and forefinger. "I figured Price's little get-togethers are always good for new customers. Hell, I met you, didn't I?"

    "But what about him doping you?"

    "Wasn't like that, neither. I take shit or don't take shit of my own free will. I was just taste-tasting the latest. Decided I didn't like it. So, keep these if you want." Next to the sinister mound of black powder, four of the capsules were getting ready to roll off the table. Luther scooped them back into the bottle he'd brought and casually tossed them to Art, who caught the pitch one-handed. The house seemed to lurch again but it was an illusion; both men felt the press of moving air bulidozering against the exterior. Luther looked up toward heaven. "Damn."

    "Did you really hit that woman?" Art felt like his own ventriloquist's dummy, his arm up his own ass, wiggling his jaw and making him say things to deter notice from all the aberrant things he'd done in the past few hours.

    "Katha? Oh, man." Luther drained his coffee but his voice stayed parched. "She's this corporate ice princess from the city. Real standoffish. So naturally I come in looking like her worst nightmare. No business card, no lunch there."

    "You weren't appropriate dating material?"

    "Huh! You tell me." Luther presented himself as though the conclusion was obvious to anyone with a brain. "Till later last night, when she got a look at my gun, grabbed my crotch, and asked me to fuck her. With the gun. Never asked my name. She drops her clothes and wants me to put a rubber on my gun, wants the barrel up her ass with a round in the chamber and the trigger cocked."

    "Jesus. She must have dropped one of Price's little party favors."

    "Maybe. I didn't see her do it. But by the time I was butt-naked with her trying to ride me like a horsey, I sure had, and she found herself on top of a different guy. You know what? I think Price had cameras in all them rooms upstairs. Why not? It'd be his style."

    "Like, for blackmail?"

    Luther shrugged. "For whatever. What are you going to do with whatsername, Susan, in there? She's part of this, too."

    "I don't know. I don't even know if I know what she's like in reality."

    "Yeah, but you banged her anyway, didn't you?"

    Art's expression seemed to crack. He felt lame.

    "My point," said Luther. "Man, you got any water? I'm dry as kindling."

    Art desperately craved another beer, but forwent the urge. Blitz trotted back in, looking for an excuse for recess. The three of them went to the garage. While Blitz peed, humiliated at having an audience, the two men cleaned up whatever evidence of Bryan they could locate. A little Windex, some scouring powder, a squirt of lime dissolver to remove the smell. Art had some of that silicon-based abrasive for cleaning scuffs off the Jag while matching the paint tone. Luther poured some salt on blood spatters on the concrete floor and pulled most of it up. He frowned at an indistinct, stubborn stain and dribbled a dollop of motor oil on the spot, smearing it around, then mopping up. "This way, not even a police dog could sniff it out," he said, and Blitz wandered over to make sure.

    Art stripped the tatters of duct tape from the metal frame, and wedged a brace against the ruptured portion of the garage door so it wouldn't blow open again. They swept up a pound or two of broken glass. The generator, hanging half out of its special compartment, was totaled; Bryan might as well have used a sledgehammer. The Jeep was bleeding transmission fluid onto the floor.

    Luther returned Art's grin. They had beaten the return of the navy guys, whether they existed or not.

    Blitz began to look toward the ceiling, sniffing air that had some sort of new message for him, and Luther put his hand out in a cautionary mode. Freeze.

    Art pantomimed his response: What?

    "Listen,'' Luther whispered, his eyes now tracking around identically to the dog's.

    Art said what? again, his hands open, his breath barely exhaling the word. He heard himself do this. More importantly, Luther heard it, too.

    "The storm," said Luther. "It's stopped."

    Art thought of Neil Armstrong, of spacewalks, of being the first human to set foot on Mars. That was how he felt when he stepped out his own front door, with Luther and Blitz handling the rearguard action.

    The quiet was unnerving, an atmospheric presence that leaned against their eardrums with its lack of input, bringing tinnitus, the roar of silence, phantom ringing, aural anomalies. The gentler air now feeling them up was heavily ionized and tasted like electricity. Gray clouds peeled upward in the distance. The sense of moving air masses, far above them. The denizens of Atlantis must have experienced all these weird sensations just before they sank for good.

    "Is that it?" said Luther, touching the back of his head and feeling static. "Holy shit-look at that!"

    The air had regained enough lateral visibility for both men to clearly see the funnel cloud that was tearing things up downbeach. South, about where the Spilsbury house would be. It was hundreds of feet high, its scorpion tail tearing up the ground and anchoring the black dervish to the earth. The top of the funnel modulated as though hungry for more. All the way up its corrugated length, airborne debris was embedded in the loops and twists of its fury.

    And the ocean was now more than halfway to the house. Fifty yards of the beach Art had been accustomed to seeing every day were underwater. The tip of the jetty was submerged, but the Sundial was still there, pointed at a forty-five-degree angle to the horizon. It had several feet to go before the lip of the dish tasted the ocean.

    "Ten minutes ago the wind was a hundred and twenty miles per hour," said Art, unable to take his gaze off the tornado raping the shoreline just inside the half-mile mark from his home. "This is nuts."

    Art looked straight up, and for five seconds imagined he could actually see the evening sky.

    "Look at that thing,'' said Luther, equally transfixed by the funnel. "Bet there's people flying around inside it."

    Maybe Price, thought Art. One could always hope.

    "I can't tell if it's headed for us or away from us," said Luther. Blitz barked a couple of times but the tornado ignored him.

    Art was holding his head. His sinuses had impacted at race-car speed. "What did he call it?"

    "Who?"

    "Willowmore. The navy guy. The eyewall. He said that if the eye of the storm passed south, it would… that tornado is inside the eyewall of the storm."

    "We're in the eye of a hurricane?''

    "Which is moving south, which means the other side of the eyewall is coming right at us from the north. The wind is going to change direction any minute now, and we'll get hit again." Behind them, in the direction of the jetty, the sky had assumed an ultraviolet hue. When Art saw the clouds moving, he thought of cream in coffee.

    "How much time?" said Luther, just as a thunderstrike shook the ground. That was plenty for Blitz, who indicated that he would await them inside, thank you very much.

    "I don't know!'' Art shouted, frustrated at having no data, no hookups, no advisories, and no rescue. "We need to check the perimeter-around the house-superfast. That water could come another hundred yards or so inland. It's called storm surge-the storm combines with the high tide."

    Luther did not want this duty, but was prepared to execute it. He was already three paces toward the yard where Art had done his shooting practice. The wooden fence was gone, airlifted away forever. "What am I looking for?!"

    "Damage to the outer structure, pieces of the roof down, any debris, any weakness we might have to patch up.'' Art moved past the exterior wall of the guest room. "Hurry."

    The two men could feel the Wind changing its mind, prickling their flesh. Tasting them.

    Art met up with Luther near the huge aerodynamic stanchion that secured the beachward foundation. The exterior deck had buckled in the middle, but held, almost as if a passing dinosaur had decided not to trust it with his full weight. The air around them was darkening by the second, and the sea was marshaling for a fresh siege.

    "Guess we batten down the hatches again," said Art.

    "Did you vacuum?" said Luther.

    Art's whole body needed to retreat to the house, but the question was so goofy it immobilized him. Had Luther just lost his mind, too? "Say what?"

    Luther pointed downbeach, toward what was left of the ravaged Spilsbury house. "Because we've got company coming, and I don't need glasses."